Make no doubt about it: Facebook’s Open Stream API is huge news.
In much the same way that developers made a mad dash to develop for FacebookFacebook reviews
platform, build TwitterTwitter reviews
apps, and, to some extent, create FriendFeedFriendFeed reviews clients, developers will now turn their attention to building third-party apps that allow users to engage with their Facebook activity feed outside of Facebook.
In the coming months, we’ll see a myriad of apps push out new iterations to support Facebook Open Stream API. Beta partner Seesmic DesktopSeesmic Desktop reviews is the first of which to give us an inside look at what the Facebook Open Stream API actually means for us end users. Their new release is scheduled to be pushed out to the public in the next few days. This is just a taste of what what the future holds for our favorite applications.
From Loic Le Meur’s blog post on the upcoming version of Seesmic Desktop, we learn that the fresh application will have side-by-side views of Twitter and Facebook. Yes TweetDeck allows you to post to Facebook, but the new Seesmic Desktop will give you a complete view of your activity feed. Essentially everything you visit Facebook to check - status updates, photos, videos, likes, comments - will all come directly to you, on the desktop.
And it’s not just read-only. As a Seesmic Desktop user, once you add your Facebook account, your stream will not only come to you, but you can interact with it. You’ll be able to post status updates and photos to Facebook (just select from the drop down), like and comment on friends’ content, and leverage the myriad of other features that Seesmic Desktop already supports for Twitter.
We asked Le Meur about account support for admin users of Facebook pages and groups, and he says that, “pages and groups won’t have separate views at the beginning, but we are planning to add these.” That feature addition alone could be huge. Imagine being a social media manager for a company and having the ability to track, manage, and engage with a huge portion of your company’s social media presence right from your desktop client.
We’re highly anticipating this new release and look forward to seeing more and more applications leverage the Open Stream API. Let us know your thoughts, and which apps you’d like to see integrate with Facebook Open Stream in the comments.
